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Expendables, The (UK - BD)

Our Marcus joins the Expendables but wants to join Arnie's team a lot more...

Feature

Sylvester Stallone leads the elite group of mercenaries, the Expendables, as they take up a job offer by the mysterious Mr Church (Bruce Willis). Heading to Latin America to take out a maniacal general, the team discover that the real man in charge is ex-CIA man Jason Munroe (Eric Roberts) and the Expendables mission goes from difficult to trouble—fast.

The Expendables felt like a breath of nostalgic air this summer with the idea of watching some of our old school action stars coming together to kick some baddies' asses and remind us how the eighties used to roll. It didn’t really feel like the story mattered, just seeing the combination of Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis and Arnie in a movie got its claws into the male population and The Expendables hit hard on the radar.

Watching the movie wasn’t exactly as feel good as I’d hoped though. I knew Arnie’s role was limited to a single scene, so the biggest disappointment was dealt with before going into the flick, but beside feeling good for Jason Statham, who gets to increase his ever growing action hero status while rubbing shoulders with some old school greats, and really feeling the awesomness of the Stallone/Lundgren reunion despite not considering myself much of a Rocky fan, all I really started to do was yearn to go back and rewatch the original eighties flicks.

I really liked the characters here. The Expendables as a crew were a blast to be around. I loved the inclusion of Mickey Rourke’s character and his relationship with Stallone and Statham really gelled fast, but everything outside of that i wasn’t that fussed with. The entire mad general/Eric Roberts stuff just felt paint by numbers and I got bored with it pretty quick. I’ve never really cared for Roberts in movies (well other than the original Best of the Best maybe) and the entire mission felt so dated and done before.

On top of that it dawned on me that this wasn’t really my collection of action stars. I was never a Stallone guy, my fondest memory of Rambo being the Rambo III game, Lundgren was all about Rocky and He-Man to me as a kid with his highlight being Universal Solider, Jet Li has never done that much for me and WWF/WWE means absolutely nothing to me, so that wipes out the wrestlers, and while I do like Terry Crews loads, it’s for Everybody Hates Chris above all else, so this isn’t exactly the role I’d want to see him in.

I just found myself wanting a real combination of the greats. Some high kicks and splits from Van Damme (who apparently turned it down), a bit of Jackie Chan, or even some Seagal. I would have loved to have seen more Bruce Willis and of course after the Arnie scene (which is one of the best feel-good moments of the year) I just couldn’t shake how much I miss Arnie on screen and how much better The Expendables (as well as all movies) would be with him back throwing the punches and dropping one liners on us out of nowhere.

All in all The Expendables kicked plenty of ass and it did well keeping it gritty and dirty like action movies used to be. Weirdly though, despite all the great moments, the movie as a whole left me wanting and I'm not sure the combination of these Expendables had enough to fill the gap.

Video

The general look of The Expendables looks pretty great in HD. Well lit characters, murky backgrounds to make our action heroes glow, and a good level of detail to sell the many, many wrinkles on show on the cast’s faces. I wouldn’t necessarily say the image didn’t have room for improvement as odd elements felt a little lacking. There’s the odd soft shot and a handful of grainier moments but all of this adds to the grittier aspects of the old school action hero, so there’s little to complain about really.

Audio

The DTS-HD 7.1 track offers a solid experience with strong sound effects and a good balance between all the elements in the track. Outside of some of Stallone’s mumbles, the dialogue is a solid element in the track and the song choices on the soundtrack sound very strong in the track.

The bass has a hell of a presence when it needs to and sells every boom and bang with some real power and atmospheric elements, like echoes and bouncing shells all beef out the audio for the all-out action extravaganza we all hoped this would be.

Extras

Opening with the Nic Cage Grindhouse-esq Drive Angry trailer, we move onto the movie specific features with ‘Bonus View: The Expendables Ultimate Recon Mode’ which is somewhere in the middle ground between a commentary track, a picture-in-picture mode, along with a splattering of the Warner Bros. Maximum Movie Mode. The majority of it is the commentary but as the Stallone solo track is an easy and interesting listen, packed full of detail and all that combined with the added content along the way makes for a great way to re-watch the movie.

'From the Ashes: Post production Documentary' (26:36 HD) follows the same style of the Recon Mode and has Sly telling us the details intercut with on-set footage and some of his crew discussing the editing together of footage they managed to get filmed and then how the movie evolved after tests and early cuts. Once again there’s something about Stallone’s laid back presentation that made this more enjoyable than it probably should have been and with this being the only real extra on the disc (look out for more exclusive features on the Steel Book edition as well as even more on the US disc) this made for a good watch.

The Gag Reel (05:03 SD) is more goofy than funny and the single deleted scene (00:45 SD) is a Dolph joke that shows off his usual iffy acting. The Promo Gallery is made up of the theatrical trailer, the TV Spots and the Poster Gallery.

Lastly there’s BD Live (or Lionsgate Live as is the case here), a promo video for metamenus.com, options for D-Box, and BD Touch and the ability to add/view bookmarks.

Overall

With a disc that has solid A/V and an okay splattering of extras (but with lots more available elsewhere, so make sure you look around before you buy) The Expendables provides a good HD release where the wrinkles on the eighties stars' faces work well side by side with the modern action stars. The movie wasn’t quite the feel good ride I was hoping for, despite being loaded with just the right amount of booms, bangs and punches. More than anything though, The Expendables just made me want to rewatch some of the old action classics.

* Note: The above images are taken from the Blu-ray release and resized for the page. Full-resolution captures are available by clicking individual images, but due to .jpg compression they are not necessarily representative of the quality of the transfer.

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This film was the biggest disappointment of the year for me, even though I bought the steelbook BD. The story is sooooo dull. I was really hoping for one of two things:

1) an 80's pastiche where everything is overblown, silly and the one liners fall like spent cartridges,

or

2) a gritty, engaging action movie with a load of 'old hands' but with the modern capabilities of film making and the superb story and execution of the last Rambo film.

Sadly, I got neither. I saw this in the cinema and was so bored. I tried to watch it again the other night and got to the same point where the daughter decides to stay and switched it off to watch Aliens.

I bought the steelbook for 2 reasons: (sorry for all these bullet points)

1) I want them to make a better Expendables 2 movie, hopefully with (as the poster above me said) Van Damme and Segal - maybe Kurt Russell too, although having just done a Tarantino movie has probably pushed his price skyward.

2) I hear Stallone steelbooks can be very sought after. The german Rambo IV steelbook springs to mind.

I had a real problem with this BD. Like AvP2 (which I had a good old rant on) I couldn't tell what was going on half the time during night and dark shots.

Daylight scenes were fine but anytime it was night, I was struggling to see who was doing what to who. The Stallone/Austin fight (seen in good light in the Inferno Doc) was virtually impossible to follow. In the end I had to turn the brightness up all the way to the max in order to see who was onscreen. This rendered any light scenes way out in terms of brightness.

I did worry that my TV (a Tosh LCD) was starting to lose it's backlight so I went to the THX optimizer on the T2 disc and everything picture wise still checked out fine.

The darkness along with the now totally over used close quarters shooting and quick editing spoiled what was a very average film. A film that I had a fair amount of good will towards until it turned out that that there were going to be plenty more night scenes.

Apart from a nice scene with Mickey Rourke, all the characters were cardboard and their motivations were never clear.

Why put Dolph Lundgren in the film and then have him p**s off half way through? Why bother having him in the film as that character at all?

Why go to great lengths letting everyone know how great and bone crushing the fights are and then shoot it in a way that might as well have them just waving their arms around and adding on punching sound effects. The Bourne films went that way as well so I'm not just singling The Expendables out.

Having said that, I do hold out hope that any sequel would be an improvement. And next time, hopefully it'll be set during the day.

Nice review. I agree that the story felt paint-by-numbers and it was more of a nostalgia thing. 2 things really stood out for me. One was the Arnold scene - not because it was Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger together, but simply because it was Arnold Schwarzenegger!! Loved the scene. The second was that in a movie starring Stallone, Jet Li, Lundgren, Rourke and Steve Austin, Statham came across as the most bad-ass of the lot! He was amazing and was the best of the lot.

I heard rumors of a sequel that would include Van Varenberg and some real cool action stars. I hope that's true. I have watched every Van Damme movie, besides Sinav and it would be great to see him theatrically again. And Arnold needs a bigger role!